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This article centers on the profound discrepancy between efforts by First Nations to obtain injunctions against industry and the state versus the far more successful record of corporations and governments seeking to obtain injunctions against First Nations. We examine how the common law test for injunctions in struggles over lands and resources leads to these results. We begin with the history of injunctions in the Aboriginal law context, especially the development of s. 35(1) jurisprudence which ironically deprived First Nations of access to injunctions, despite an earlier period of successful defence of Indigenous land rights using this legal tool. We then focus on the doctrinal and political function of the “public interest” consideration in injunction cases, locating this concept within a broader political economy framework. Finally, we turn to the origins of the injunction as an equitable remedy and argue that the current imbalance in injunction success rates ought to be understood though a re-examination of equity within a broader historical trajectory of settler-colonial legality. We conclude that the heavy lifting done by notions of ‘public interest’ both relies on and obscures the circumvention and exclusion of Aboriginal treaty and constitutional rights from the law of injunctions and constitutes a de facto resolution of Aboriginal land rights in Canada. Finally, we ask what place, if any, exists in injunction jurisprudence for Indigenous law and governance.
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This personal narrative reflects on the author’s engagement with Patricia Williams’ The Alchemy of Race and Rights over a period of 15 years encompassing law school, private practice and activist and academic work. In charting the trajectory of the author’s development as a critical legal scholar, the piece highlights the enduring contribution of Williams’ work for those working and writing at the intersections of rights, contentious politics and the law.
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The jurisprudential borders of the Canadian state appeared to shift in the aftermath of the landmark judgment of the Supreme Court of Canada on the constitutionality of the security certificate provisions of the Immigration and Refugee Protection Act in early 2007. Yet Charkaoui v. Canada ultimately maintained the contingency of the Charter of Rights and Freedoms, re-drawing long-standing divisions along lines of alleged risk, allegiance and origin, despite the emergence of tentative shifts in jurisprudential conceptions of state sovereignty and extra-territoriality. Where previous national security cases involving constitutional rights claims by non-citizens were predicated on a conceptualization of state sovereignty as the right to exclude from territory, reading Charkaoui in the context of four subsequent cases involving the role of Canadian state actors abroad gives rise to the prospect of the Charter operating to delineate and maintain the limits of state sovereignty within and beyond national borders. While the Charter may accompany the extended reach of the Canadian state in some of its guises, it provides only a minimal constraint on the actions of its agents, reinscribing rather than challenging sovereignty. Accordingly, this article argues that the ‘sovereign Charter’ represents a key moment in the evolution of the Canadian state’s national security, immigration and foreign policy strategies, serving to harden the boundaries of the nation, from within and without. By theorizing the doctrinal rules related to the extra-territorial application of the Charter, this article concludes that rights, as reflected in Charkaoui and subsequent caselaw, continue to offer only a limited mode of resistance against sovereign power. Beyond both immigration law’s historical preoccupation with race and the contemporary focus on the ‘war on terror,’ the very notion of rights functions as a discursive and aspirational marker of sovereignty.
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